Where have all the great team goals gone?

When was the last time we saw a truly beautiful team goal scored in the Premier League? A full-flowing, one-touch, two-touch move in which every player involved seemed to be exactly on the same wavelength, all speaking the same language and carving through the middle of the opponent’s defence with magnificent ease.

A Jack Wilshere against Norwich; a Willian against Brighton; a Leroy Sane against Arsenal. A piece of teamplay that transcends football and catapults our emotions into a realm that can only be rivalled by the arts, such as music, painting and poetry.

When was the last time a goal like that was scored? I struggle to look through any of the most recent seasons and recall a time where I felt the way I felt watching the aforementioned showcases of brilliance, whereas only a decade ago, they seemed far more common.

This art of team goals has been lost and this isn’t a mere coincidence. It’s a reflection of the sorry state that football seems to find itself in at the moment. We’ve all been there. Down the pub, in the kitchen talking to your dad, when you hear ‘football is so boring now. Where have all the good players gone. In my day, we never…’ He fades off as you try to drown out the rhetoric you’ve been hearing consistently in recent times.

But I’m sorry to say, your dad has a point. The pundits who played decades ago, constantly bashing coaches and teams for being too ‘safe’ and not playing with enough personality, also have a point. 

When Pep Guardiola’s Barcelona announced themselves to the footballing world in 2008, their style of football was the antithesis of what I’m talking about now. It was entertaining, it was fast, it was expressive, it gave you that feeling when you watched it - like it was a perfect something, better than us. But weirdly, almost 2 decades on, it is the foundations that the Spanish coach bult which have paved the way for the uninspiring dross we’ve become so used to seeing on our screens.

Pep, from the offset, was all about control, but up to a point. He wanted to control almost everything on the pitch, whether his side had possession or whether they didn’t. More often than not, they did have the ball and Guardiola made sure the instructions of where and how to receive the ball, when to pass, when to move into this area in order to create space for your teammate… Every detail was utilised to the absolute maximum to ensure that one thing. Control. But, only up to a point.

Pep knew his limitations. He knew that at Barcelona, he was dealing with forwards and midfielders who were far more talented than he ever was and so to try and puppet every little decision they made would be foolish. You can’t tell Messi what to do in the final third when he has the ball at his feet, you leave it up to him.

When you have genius scattered all over the field, the most disastrous thing you can try and do is inhibit them with instructions and relentless demands. Pep wanted to control his team up until the point where he could let the reins free and allow them to do what they did better than anyone else in world football. Express themselves. 

That’s why the common consensus is they were the club side to ever walk the planet. Yes, Pep had so much to do with it but much of his genius came from the fact that he didn’t over-exert himself on his players. He had control until he knew this control was no longer beneficial. When the ball had progressed to a certain point, or Barcelona had their opposition looking vulnerable, that’s when the control switch flipped back to the players and the result was an inimitable brilliance we constantly find ourselves harking back to.

Up to this point, the players had always maintained the power on the pitch. Coaches had ideas about how they wanted their players to interact with each other and the ball, but ultimately they left a lot of the final details up to the players. Arsene Wenger and Sir Alex Ferguson are two prime examples. Yes, they had standards and non-negotiable demands for all their players, but they empowered these same players to be able to improvise, actively solve problems and learn on-the-go. They knew where the talent was and so their best bet was obviously to let it fly. That’s why their sides became so synonymous with brilliant team goals. They were all instinctive, unscripted. Coaches can’t pre-plan artistry like this because they aren’t the artists, the players are.

That takes us to football right now, where coaches, far less talented than the three coaches I have mentioned, have taken Pep's work and used it to build their own philosophy, their own ideas about how the game should be played. But this time, they want all the control. 

Everything seems to be pre-determined and lacking spontaneity. ‘Positional play’ in football has evolved to a point where players are receiving limitless instructions of what to do in position A when they’ve got the ball, or in position C when their opponent is in position F. If you take a risk that doesn’t pay off, if you venture out to a position on the pitch where you interpret the space is, and the coach doesn’t… You’ll do well to find yourself in the starting XI for the next game. 

This has been life in the Premier League for the last 5 years. Managers have taken Pep’s philosophy and used it to fill their ego with the fact that they can control absolutely everything on the football pitch. Even now, we’re seeing coaches grab the reigns of control even more than was once thought possible. Through their unwavering focus on set-pieces and long throw-ins, football has become even more boring and calculated and you can’t convince me otherwise.

Do you see the trend? As coaches become more and more in control of their teams, the football gets more uninspiring. What they fail to realise is that most of the players they’re coaching are more than able to make decisions for themselves because they’re in that 0.000001% of people who were actually good enough and smart enough to make it to the highest level.

The beautiful team goals I was mentioning at the beginning of this rant, go watch them back. What do you see? The players had no time to think, they had had to improvise and act before their brain was able process what was happening. That’s where the magic is. When it’s off the cuff. Thoughtless. They were all just playing off instinct and each other. 

Bergkamp vs Newcastle, James Rodriguez vs Uruguay. Both moments where players received the ball in awkward, unplanned situations and they had to use their creativity and their imagination to come up with the solution. 

Footballers at the top level are geniuses in their own right. Thinking you can control their genius because you know better than some of the world’s best  is egotistical and a skewed way of thinking. I don’t care if you were his manager, producer or songwriter, you would never tell Michael Jackson how to sing, how to perform on stage. You leave it up to him.

Football is boring right now because it’s filled with people who think they can tell other people far more talented than them, what to do. That’s why we hardly see any beautiful team goals or moments of individual quality. It’s nearly all engineered, all planned ahead of time. 

Once the power is returned back to the players, so they can act and express themselves the way they want, and combine with each other the way only they know they can, only then will we see the beautiful game back on our screens. Because right now, I have a hard time calling it that.